Rev. Tess Baumberger: The quality of mercy

Tuesday

Sep 22, 2009 at 12:01 AMSep 22, 2009 at 10:17 PM

These coming months, in my sermons at Unity Church, I am going to be exploring some traditional Acts of Mercy as we ask ourselves why were are here as a church community. These acts include physical acts like feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless, and spiritual acts such as bearing wrongs patiently, and forgiving all injuries.

Rev. Tess Baumberger

These coming months, in my sermons at Unity Church, I am going to be exploring some traditional Acts of Mercy as we ask ourselves why were are here as a church community. These acts include physical acts like feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless, and spiritual acts such as bearing wrongs patiently, and forgiving all injuries.

These latter two will be the focus of my sermon on Sept. 27 because that evening the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur begins. In our faith we recognize the wisdom of all the world’s religions, and this feast has a great deal of wisdom. Yom Kippur marks the end of several days of reckoning and repentance, of forgiving the wrongs and injuries of others, and of taking responsibility for our own.

The tie to mercy is clear here, but what inspired me to explore mercy was seeing a recent film version of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” If you know the play you might be puzzled or even outraged that I would speak about it on a Jewish holiday. Why? Because it portrays a Jewish character, Shylock, in a very prejudiced manner. It is highly anti-Semitic.

Obviously, the play’s merciless, offensive, and disturbing portrayal of Shylock is not what made me think of the theme of mercy. Mercy enters in an incredibly beautiful speech by the character Portia, disguised as a male attorney, trying to save the man she loves. She says, “The quality of mercy is not strain’d; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.” Here “strain’d” means that it is not restrained – mercy is abundant and flows irresistibly. Mercy by its nature flows over all.

My dictionary defines mercy as the disposition to overlook injuries, or to treat an offender better than he or she deserves. Mercy is more than just forgiveness. It is closer to compassion. It implies an understanding not only of the acts to be forgiven, but also of the actor.

These moving words flowed from the same pen that sketched the character of Shylock. Why did not Shakespeare’s understanding and mercy flow even to him? Shakespeare did step outside his times and write mercifully on the plight of women. Why didn’t he step outside his times enough to write a compassionate portrait of a member of another oppressed minority?

As a writer and former theater minor, I admire Shakespeare’s gifts – but how to reconcile this admiration with his anti-Semitism? Sometimes as spiritual, religious and ethical beings we have to struggle with issues that are complex and bewildering. My struggle comes down to, “Is there any way to redeem Shakespeare?”

A few years ago, on vacation up in Maine, I found a rock that I call my “hurricane rock.” You can see that it was once liquid because its flecks of pink, white and black form a swirling pattern. It captures a tempest moment of intense heat and geologic upheaval.

When I first held and contemplated that rock, shortly after seeing “The Merchant of Venice” I understood something about myself, and about human nature. You see, people can become emotionally frozen in time like that rock, trapped in fierce or traumatic experiences. Those moments become solid and heavy in one’s heart and mind. They seem unchangeable, immutable.

Perhaps Shakespeare’s play is like my hurricane rock – a play that portrayed and solidified the tempest of the anti-Semitism of his time. As such it may help us understand something of the nature of hatred and our human capacity for that emotion.

In an essay on hatred, African-American theologian Howard Thurman distinguishes the hatred of the oppressed for the oppressor, as caught in Shylock’s character, from the hatred of the oppressor for the oppressed, as demonstrated in Shakespeare’s portrayal of him. Thurman says that while hatred can seem like a great and mobilizing force, especially for oppressed people, ultimately hatred destroys the heart and spirit, perhaps by locking us into those tempest moments. We are not made of rock. We must move and flow with life.

Portia’s speech tells us that mercy can free us from concretized hatred. Mercy has the quality of water. Water, like mercy, cleanses and heals. It smoothes our rough edges. It erodes hard heavy places inside us. It moves us to compassion, it frees.

Whether it frees us to appreciate the good gifts of Shakespeare and leave the bad is an individual decision. For me, Portia’s speech is a start toward forgiving its author his blindness to that terrible prejudice of his times, that still taints our own.

The Rev. Tess Baumberger, PhD, is minister at the Unity Church of North Easton, Mass. You can reach her at 508-238-6373 or tbaumberger@uuma.org. For more information about Unity Church, please visit our Web site www.unity-church.com.